


the darker corners of the universe

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 00:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15207302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: A collection of ficlets.Featuring nail polish, wedding rings, birthdays, sand, a late night conversation, and What Happened On Venus.





	1. lacquer

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr. (@swallowtailed)

Nureyev wears a lot of nail polish. It’s a good way to distinguish his identities, mark himself with red or blue or black, and doing his nails is soothing. Like watching a new persona take shape in his hands. 

Rex Glass wears ladykiller red. It’s not Dark Matters protocol but you know how it is. Can’t resist a good red, can Glass. Perseus Shah wears dark blue, professional but light enough to shimmer when he waves his hands. And Duke Rose– well, he was supposed to be a pinkish kind of person,  _rose_  and all that, but somehow Nureyev got caught up in thinking about Juno, how he was going to see Juno again, the only person alive who can look him in the eye and call him by his real name. When he thinks of Juno he thinks of himself as Peter. And Peter– Peter Actual– likes purple, so dark it edges on black, with glitter faint like stardust.

So that’s the color Duke Rose ends up wearing, applied while sitting in the dark and waiting half-breathless for Juno to arrive.

Peter wears long-lasting brands of nail polish, time-tested against heat, cold, and dune spider saliva, so the purple doesn’t chip off his nails for a while. It stays through a madcap card game, an impossible train heist, and a kidnapping to an ancient tomb. The first crack appears days into their capture, after the latest round of testing. Juno has dozed off but Peter’s still on edge. In the dim light of the tomb, he peers at the offending nail. Did he keep the polish on him? He can’t remember which pocket it would be in anyway and somehow he can’t muster the energy to look.

He escapes eventually. Always does. He sits in the lee of a standing stone and lays out his assets. Just what he managed to secret away in his clothes. A square of gauze, a box of matches, a needle and thread, a little bottle of dark purple nail polish that glitters like the edge of the galaxy when he holds it up to the fading light.

Peter does his nails as the sun sets and the shadow of the tomb lengthens over him, because it’s a distraction and his mind will spin itself to pieces without something to focus on. The polish fills the cracks in the last coat, soaks into the nails he broke trying to pick the lock on the cell. It looks a little like dark, glossy armor.

Days later, or maybe weeks, Peter sits in the lobby of Hyperion General, can’t find anything to do with his hands. Pulls out the bottle of nail polish and applies one last coat, but he’s not really thinking about it. Juno’s alive,  _Juno’s alive_ , and there’s an entire galaxy out there to see.

When he wakes up the next morning, Juno is gone. Peter stands over the sink and scrubs purple off his nails. The color is too dark for it to be a clean job with his hands shaking like this but he has to get off this planet. 

He boards the first shuttle off Mars with the last of Peter Nureyev staining his hands.


	2. when i come back (i'll wear your wedding ring)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr.  
> Chapter title from "Jet Plane".

Peter’s in Masquerade, one of Venus’s smaller metropolises, when he buys the ring.

The confidence game he’s playing is a long one this time, stretching from weeks into months, and he hasn’t seen Mars (Hyperion) (Juno) in what feels like forever. Masquerade is beautiful but it’s nothing like Hyperion City. So when his mark starts asking the personal questions, there’s only one answer to give.

 _Married, actually_.  _A year but we’ve known each other for five._

 _He’s a detective…_   _oh, I should say, with the police on… Neptune. Aurora City._

_I miss him terribly._

_Ah, no, I don’t wear jewelry on business trips._

_Of course I’m aware of the custom, but my detective never was much for tradition._

_As a memento, you mean?_

And then there’s nothing to do but follow through, especially since he wants his mark to trust him, and so Peter wanders through the shopping district of Masquerade in search of a jeweler selling unobtrusive rings. He does find one, after an afternoon of searching. Gold, so slim it’s almost weightless, chemically strengthened against nigh anything. His mark fawns over him, thanks him for supporting local businesses, and Peter signs a couple fake contracts with a smile.

The ring isn’t at all heavy but he can feel it on his hand anyway. It’s not uncomfortable. It fits well enough, rather, that he doesn’t take it off when he gets back to Mars. Juno notices everything. It’s what he does. But he doesn’t mention the ring, and Peter decides he’s not going to say anything either. They can just ignore it. It’s a skill they seem to share, repressing things.

Rita notices the ring after a couple days, and her shriek is enough to bring Juno running out of his office. He stops short when he sees Peter standing there with a hand over his face and Rita making a noise kind of like a deflating balloon. “You didn’t tell me you got  _married!_ ” she says, and it takes a while to explain that they didn’t actually get married, but Juno looks at Peter with an expression Peter doesn’t think he’s seen before. Or maybe he has, in half-moments, in city lights, in the breath before a kiss.

“So why’d you get it?” Juno asks, days later. He reaches out, catches Peter’s hand in his. Touches the ring with his thumb.

“I was on a job,” Peter says lightly, “and I decided I liked it.” It’s laconic, for him, and it’s not the whole story, but if Juno wants to press then he will.

Juno doesn’t ask anything else, and Peter lets it drop.

He’s back in Masquerade some time later, tying up a few loose ends, and he happens by the shop where he bought his ring. It’s late but the lights are still on, and the clerk doesn’t bat an eye at Peter’s request. He puts the box in his pocket and almost forgets about it until he’s back on Mars again, hanging up his coat in the back of Juno’s closet. The gold ring and the chain threaded through it are light in his hand.

Juno is sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of computer printouts fanned out in front of him. Peter clicks his heels on the floor, just loud enough to be heard. Juno doesn’t look up, but he doesn’t flinch when Peter drapes himself over Juno’s shoulders. Instead he lifts a hand and places it over Peter’s where it rests above Juno’s heart.

Neither of them says anything. Late afternoon, and the light in the window is reddish gold with the setting sun. The ring throws off light when Peter unclasps the chain one-handed and places it, very carefully, around Juno’s neck.

Juno tucks the ring into his shirt and turns, putting them eye to eye. “Nureyev,” he says.

“Juno.”

“You’re back.”

“I am.”

“How was Venus?”

“As ever.”

It’s not going to get said— any of the things they could say— not that Peter left and came back and left and came back and left and came back with a ring, and then did it again, because any trick worth doing is worth doing twice. Not that Peter is wearing a ring on his hand and Juno is wearing a ring next to his heart. Not what any of that means, what it might mean.

But it’s there anyway and that, Peter thinks, is enough.


	3. summer gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr.  
> Title from "Winter Song" by The Head And The Heart.

The apartment is silent when Juno gets home. Neon glows down on the street, just enough light to see by. He shuts the door behind him. “Hey. You there?”

Peter doesn’t reply. Maybe he’s lost in thought, or maybe he actually fell asleep sitting on the fire escape. His silhouette is just visible through the open window. Head and shoulders, one elbow propped back on the sill. Juno crosses the room and sits on the windowsill, leaning his back against the frame. Peter says nothing, but he leans his head against Juno’s thigh, still looking somewhere far beyond the glowing skyline.

Juno’s neighborhood isn’t busy at night. Cars pass, taillights flashing. People make dark shapes on the sidewalk. When it’s quiet like this, Oldtown is—

He can feel it, sometimes, he thinks. An off-kilter axis on which Hyperion, his Hyperion, spins. Something in the water. There’s no water on Mars.

Peter says, finally, “It’s my birthday.”

“Didn’t know you had one.”

“Not in any literal sense. I did— oh, remake myself, once upon a time. A metaphorical birthday, I suppose.”

“What’s it a metaphor for?”

Peter sighs, maybe, or laughs just once, or pushes the beginning of a sob out of his lungs and into the still air. “I don’t know.”

Juno doesn’t have anything to say to that, and he doesn’t think Peter does either, but it’s warm enough that they could sit out here all night. The dome crackles far overhead, pulses of light sparking and fading. Peter’s still looking past it, up, to something only he can see.

He says, quietly, “Twenty-three years today. In solar time, that is. Only twelve Brahman years.”

“Feels like it should be longer. Yeah.” Juno doesn’t mean Brahma, means someplace nearer and just as distant, but he thinks Peter knows that.

“Perhaps I never really left.” Peter reaches up, tracing a path with his hand, unerring. “Just there. If not for the dome, we could see it.”

“You want to?”

“No.”

“For me it’s been… nineteen? Maybe?”

“And?”

“I’ve been back,” he says.

“Are you glad you left?”

Juno shakes his head. “Don’t know. Some days I don’t think I ever lived anywhere else.”

Peter sighs a little. “Happy birthday to me.”

“You know,” Juno says, “I never celebrated my birthday.”

“Never?”

“Mostly.”

“But Rita would be inconsolable if you didn’t let her throw you a party.”

“Didn’t tell her when it is. She knows, though.”

“And how would that be?”

“It’s on my HCPD records. And it’s… it’s other things, is all.” There’s a scar on Juno’s chest, a crooked line between his ribs. Not deep enough to kill. “Look,” he says. “Birthdays aren’t shit in this house.”

Peter turns, looking over his shoulder to make eye contact for the first time all night, and the shine in his eyes might be unshed tears or the light of distant stars. “I think I can live with that, detective.”


	4. lost or taken or claimed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr.

What everyone knows about sandstorms is this:

they make things clean.

No one on Mars has talked about the rain washing everything away since the first settlers got caught in an acid rainstorm. Here the rain burns things away instead, leaves them raw, no softer than before.

But when the sandstorms come—

The tunnels close, and the domes shutter themselves, but the sand sneaks in through cracks and crevices, tumbles through the streets. Footprints and tire tracks are swept away outside. The wind howls. Light vanishes. The desert valleys shift and change, reforming themselves in the storm, and the sun rises on a new world.

Same world, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

The rock and stone are still, up until they’re worn away and buried by eons of sand and wind. Mars is shifting, changing, slow. The sandstorms sweep over the planet, day by day, hour by hour.

Things are buried in the sandstorms. Things are lost, or taken, or claimed— things are claimed by the sandstorms and the wild deserts. Mars takes its dues and it takes them, oh, it takes them in things lost. Blood and memories and hope.

Footprints trail away from something like a tragedy. The sandstorm sweeps them clean.


	5. perihelion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr.  
> Written for day 1 of Juno Steel Fluff Week 2018 (prompt: date night).

_(perihelion, n. the point in my journey at which I am closest to you.)_

 

It’s late one night, in the kind of neon night that sings, very gently, about a bright-eyed big city. The kind of night that floats on the surface of itself.

Juno’s hands move, and his pen spills ink across his fingertips, black smudges on gold nail polish. He looks across his desk at the comms unit, both more solid and sleeker than his usual model. The antenna, delicate silver wire, draws a thin shadow on the desk. The screen pulses.  _SCANNING… SCANNING…_

There’s only one signal for the comms to search for, and though it’s near the signal still isn’t close enough. Not quite.

Juno goes back to the case file spread across his desk. Makes another note, purple ink this time that doesn’t stain his hands. Outside the window, cars soar past, headlights throwing slatted shadows across the wall.

The comms unit stops pulsing and flashes, three times in a row. Juno drops his pen and grabs for the comms, watches the screen solidify.  _SIGNAL ACQUIRED. CALL INCOMING._

The loading screen blinks and vanishes, and in its place is a staticky image: Peter Nureyev, at an angle that suggests he’s reclining with his comms propped up on his chest. “Hello there,” he says, with the kind of slow smile that suggests the way the light looks through bedsheets on a lazy Sunday morning.

“Hey,” Juno says, and kicks his chair away from his desk. It rolls toward the wall, and Juno stops himself with a hand on the sill, puts his feet up on the armchair and leans back. From this angle, he can see through the blinds on the window, through the dome, up to the stars and any shuttles that may be passing through them. “Took you a while.”

“I can’t control the speed of this shuttle, Juno darling. But I’m honored you think I can.” Peter’s voice is as thick and sweet as honey. “Missed you,” he says, offhanded.

“You too,” Juno says, and pretends his chest doesn’t fill up at that. It’s been years, and still Peter somehow knows exactly what to say.

“What time is it there?”

Juno spins his chair, checks the clock, spins back. “One-thirty.”

“You should be asleep.”

“Didn’t want to miss you.”

Peter stills, smiles. “Detective,” he says, and there’s a planet’s worth of fondness in it.

“Shut up,” Juno tells him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t have to.” Juno leans his legs against the wall, tucks an arm behind his head. The stars glitter. Specks flash across the sky, satellites and shuttles. “So there’s this case I’m working on.”

“Do tell.”

“Bunch of thefts.”

“Why, Juno, how forward!”

Juno finds himself laughing at that. “It doesn’t look like one of yours. Unless it was?”

“Hardly. And— do you recognize my work? Is this about Venus again?”

“No, but we can make it about Venus again if you want,” Juno says, but he’s grinning, he can see himself reflected in the screen of the comms.

“You left the street signs up,” Peter points out, all smugness through his brilliant smile. Two assholes, just grinning at each other through a highly advanced short-range private comms network.

The screen flashes. “Oh—” Peter says, through static. “I’m sorry, Juno, dear— out of range—  call you when— coming back— I love you—”

 _OUT OF RANGE_ , the comms says.  _SIGNAL LOST. DO YOU WISH TO RELOCATE THE SIGNAL?_                

Juno powers the comms down. He sets it on the windowsill, looks up through the window. It’s late, early, the middle of the night and the middle of the universe, as a shuttle passes near enough to catch Mars’s gravity and fling itself onward through the stars. Onward, but returning, in the slow, familiar orbit of atoms and galaxies and people in love.    


	6. What Happened On Venus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr.  
> Written for day 4 of Juno Steel Fluff Week 2018 (prompt: affection).

When you know someone long enough, you start to recognize their handiwork. The tail on their q, the quirk of their smile, the dumb fucking prank crimes that no one will ever solve,  _what_   _the_   _hell_ ,  _Nureyev_.

Juno’s between cases and playing solitaire when Rita yells from her desk, “Mista Steeeeeeel!”

“What?”

“You gotta come see this, Mista Steel, it’s got your name on it and everything!”

Juno groans, but he goes over to her desk to see what she’s yelling about. There’s a pair of reporters on her monitor. Venusian News Network. They’re talking about a crime. Some guy on a hoverbike stole a fuckton of street signs. It’s weird, sure, but—

“Why’d you want me to see this, Rita?”

“They’ll play it again in juuuuuuust a second,” she says, grinning like a fiend.

Juno’s about to ask what the hell she’s talking about when the screen switches to an animated map of the capital of Venus. Green dots mark the thefts. There are dozens, and as one of the reporters narrates that this is the path the thief took, a line begins to connect the dots.

And there, written in petty theft right across the central district of the capital of Venus, is a single word:  _Juno_. With a fucking heart at the end, because of course.  

“Shit,” Juno says, and grabs for his comms.

Peter doesn’t pick up, of course. He’d mentioned before leaving the week before that he wouldn’t be able to make any calls for some reason that Juno had told him not to explain. Juno isn’t going to push that, no need for unnecessary conflicts of interest, but it does mean he can’t yell at Peter about expressing affection through crime until he gets back.

Peter saunters into Juno’s office three days later, wearing slacks with a cut sharper than some knives and a baggy sweater with a wide front pocket. He sits on the edge of Juno’s desk. “Hello, detective. Miss me?”

“Did you bring all thirty-five of them back with you?” Juno asks.

“Thirty-five what?”

“Street signs, Nureyev,” Juno snaps, and it’s kind of ridiculous but  _honestly_.

“Oh!” Peter beams. “You saw! It was only thirty-four, Juno darling, and I had to dump most of them outside the city. Venusian police cruisers are very fast.” From some previously unknown pocket in his sweater, and Juno doesn’t how know he could possibly fit those, but he produces two Venusian street signs. “I only kept these two.”

Juno flips them over. One says  _Dahlia Avenue_ , the other,  _Duke Street_.

Now Peter’s got that look on his face he gets when he’s waiting for a reaction to something he thinks is clever— one eyebrow raised, smile barely hidden. Juno was going to say something about how Peter shouldn’t commit crimes in his name, what the fuck, honestly, but faced with that smile—

“This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” Juno says, “and it’s dumber than a good couple things Mick’s done.”

Peter’s still smiling. “Is that a compliment?”

“ _No_ ,” Juno says.

“But how else can I express my love for my favorite detective?”

He’s joking, Juno knows that, but it’s— it’s fucking sweet, is what it is, master-thief-wanted-on-ninety-six-planets Peter Nureyev, sitting on Juno’s desk being all goddamn thoughtful about his petty theft.

“I can’t keep these in the office,” Juno says.

“The apartment then. Over the kitchen table.”

Juno has to stop and think about that one, but there isn’t anything over the kitchen table, actually. “Okay,” he says. “Fine. You win, Nureyev, I’ll keep the damn street signs.”

Peter beams, and Juno finds himself smiling back, a little, around the edges.


End file.
